Seiji Yoshida

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Yūto Yoshida (吉田雄兎, Yūto Yoshida^?), pen name Seiji Yoshida (吉田清治, Seiji Yoshida^?), born 1913, is a Japanese writer and former soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army.^[1][2] Originally from Yamaguchi Prefecture on the Sea of Japan, he was stationed in Korea, then a colony of Japan, during World War II; he claimed that he assisted police to kidnap over 2,000 women from various rural areas of the Korean peninsula to serve as comfort women.^[3] After the war, he ran as a the Japanese Communist Party candidate in the 1947 Shimonoseki city council elections, but received only 129 votes.^{[citation needed]} In 1977 and again in 1983, he published memoirs in which he detailed his actions during the war.^[3] His books and a subsequent 1991 media interview have been credited with bringing about the apology by Foreign Affairs minister Yōhei Kōno.^[4]

As Yoshida's memoirs became widely known, he began to attract suspicion. Ikuhiko Hata, a historian at Takushoku University and one of Yoshida's leading critics, pointed to inconsistencies between Yoshida's 1977 and 1983 memoirs, using these to assert that his claims are fabricated.^[3] South Korean newspaper interviews with residents of Jeju Island, where the forced recruitment allegedly took place, found no one who admitted to remembering a sweep through a button factory there which Yoshida detailed in his 1983 memoirs.^[2][3] In May 1996, weekly magazine Shūkan Shinchō published remarks by Yoshida made to them in an interview, admitting that portions of his work had been made up. He stated that "There is no profit in writing the truth in books. Hiding the facts and mixing them with your own assertions is something that newspapers do all the time too".^[5][6][7] Since then, revisionist historians seeking to deny or downplay the existence of comfort women commonly mention Yoshida and his testimony; they cherry-pick his work as an example of low-credibility writing and attack his claims that specific women in certain locations were enslaved as comfort women, with the aim of denying that any women anywhere were victims of sexual violence by the Imperial Japanese Army.^[8]

[edit] Works

• Yoshida, Seiji (March 1977). 朝鮮人慰安婦と日本人 (Korean comfort women and Japanese people). Shin Jinbutsu Ōraisha. ISBN 978-4404007957. 
• Yoshida, Seiji (January 1983). 私の戦争犯罪―朝鮮人強制連行 (My war crimes - the forced transport of Koreans). San'ichi Shobō. ISBN 978-4380832314. 
  • Translated into Korean as Yoshida, Seiji (1989). 나는 조선사람을 이렇게 잡아갔다 -나의 전쟁범죄 고백 (I kidnapped Koreans like this - confession of my war crimes). Cheonggye Yeonguso. 

[edit] References